ForumsInternet/eCommerce

Can't beat a free plug Please don't keep posting the same thing everywhere - go to the alt boards

Go to:

http://www.vivisimo.com, This is a cpmany that provides 'velocity enterprise search'.

Vivisimo is the developer of clusty.

NatOnline is rock on pointing you to the Google advice on hiring an SEO... rather brilliant advice

Finding the right SEO involves research. The best place to start is http://www.searchengineland.com/ . Look around and see who's doing what. If you can, attend a conference on Search Engine Marketing. Go to classes, meet people, etc. Depending on the industry, this could be the most important part of your marketing.

And I agree that you should avoid the SEO software that's out there. Much of it will actually hurt you because the search engines will think that you're trying to spam or cheat them. Good luck!

To your question about "search engine gateways" all the search engines react slightly differently based on keyword density (and where the keywords are located) and text on a page. So Google likes page titles to be 6-8 words long while Yahoo likes them to be 5-7 for example.

Web Position http://www.webposition.com/ is software that helps optimize text on a page for particular circumstances such as search engine gateways. However, there are a lot better ways to spend your time than trying to optimize for each search engine (at least until you run out of other things to do) so your focus should be mostly on Google anyway and then you can come back and worry about the rest.

Can anyone recommend an ethical, effective SEO company?

Well, since nobody else did I will. I used a company called webwisemedia.com out of Los Angeles.

They dove in and achieved the results I wanted for half the price of "Name Brand Companies" that charge thousands more.

I got 25 keywords for about 4k for the year and they guaranteed first page placement for 12 months and had everything in writing. I submitted my info, they researched everything, applied the code, have supplied and placed hundreds of links per month rather than the 7 links most companies offer, offered suggestions and made the changes to my web pages all for free. In all, about 60-70 days later I had first page placement in the natural results on yahoo, and google picked it up after 3 months. ROI, 3 months plus im out of the red.

Great company, small but great. They proved to me that they could rank up with the big boys for half the cost.